"When I felt sick, I'd call an interrogator," said Salim Hamdan,
27, telling his war court judge about reward and punishment at this
remote Navy base.

With the Yemeni's war crimes trial set to start next week, no jury
was present. Instead Hamdan spent the day describing his treatment in
his attorneys' bid to get trial judge Navy Capt. Keith Allred to
exclude confessions they said were coerced from him.

They also want Allred to rule that Hamdan's virtual solitary confinement has impaired his ability to defend himself at trial.

The prison camps say they hold detainees humanely. They offer
daily open-air exercise and say that captives kept in single-occupancy,
cement-block cells shout to one another — meaning there is no solitary
confinement at Guantanamo.

Prosecutors said in a court filing that Hamdan was disciplined 84
times at Guantanamo for violations ranging from throwing a cup of urine
at guards to banging on his cell door. Defense lawyers found 15 of the
violations were for trying to speak with other detainees — "through
walls, through vents and in the recreation yard."

The Muslim father of two with a fourth-grade education looked at
his lap and fidgeted on the witness stand when he was asked about an
episode of a woman interrogator at Guantanamo touching his thigh and
groin area.

"She behaved in an improper way," he said, whimpering. "She came
very close with her whole body towards me. I couldn't do anything."

He grimaced, then said he was helpless to stop her because of
nearby soldiers. So, he said, he cooperated with his interrogators.

It was the first time the Yemeni who challenged President Bush to
the U.S. Supreme Court testified in four years of war court
proceedings.

He described being force-fed, spending months in isolation without
conversation with other Arab detainees and sleep deprivation.

An Army psychiatrist, a female colonel who examined him once,
found him sane enough for trial. She diagnosed him with a "personality
disorder."

A Pentagon-paid civilian psychiatrist, who has seen him 100 hours
since 2005, says he is so emotionally impaired by his military
detention that he at times is unresponsive to his lawyers.

"He feels dead inside," Dr. Emily Keram testified.

Hamdan's testimony was mostly somber, at times distracted and
confused, although he complained of persistent translation problems.

Led by his attorney, retired Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Swift, Hamdan
described being shifted between prison camps and losing privileges —
sometimes on allegations of misbehavior, but at other times ahead of
military and FBI interrogations.

During one month of FBI interrogation, he said, guards rapped on
the steel door of his Camp Delta cell every five to 10 minutes all
night to wake him.

Defense lawyers this week discovered military records showing he
was subjected to "Operation Sandman," a sleep deprivation program, for
50 days in 2003.

Hamdan, who appeared in traditional Yemeni attire, offered no
Western dates for the various episodes but measured them in relation to
the Muslim holy months of Ramadan he observed in detention.

For nearly a year, before a federal judge ordered his return to
the general prison population, he said he was confined to a "cell
within a cell" at Camp Echo — a special prison camp, which at the time
had no windows.

"Camp Echo is like a graveyard. ... a tomb," he testified. "That's how it is."

A tape of his first interrogation after capture in Afghanistan
shows the driver telling U.S. Special Forces that he was a Muslim
charity worker, not a bin Laden employee.

Moreover, Stone said, he didn't tell an FBI interrogator of his allegations of abuse in Afghanistan.

Hamdan also described persistent back pain, and being refused
medical treatment at times at Guantanamo — unless interrogators
summoned a Navy Corpsman. The psychiatrist, Keram, said that and a
forced-feeding episode to stop a hunger strike led to his distrust of
medical personnel.

Earlier, she described his force-feeding episode this way:
Military members in white coats strapped him down and snaked a tube
through his nose to his stomach. They did not identify themselves.
"Doctors, butchers, I couldn't tell the difference," she quoted him as
saying.

The Pentagon says it provides war-on-terrorism prisoners with safe, humane detention comparable to its sailors and soldiers.

After his November 2001 capture in Afghanistan, he testified, he
was airlifted to the Panjshir Valley. There, he said, he underwent
battlefield interrogations with arms and legs bound, a soldier's boot
on his shoulder to keep his head bowed and "a bag over my head."

Only later was he taken to military detention centers at Bagram,
where he said he was left handcuffed in chilly isolation, then to a
tent in Kandahar before his May 2002 transfer to this remote U.S. Navy
base.

He is accused of conspiring with al-Qaida and providing material
support for terror because he served as bin Laden's $200-a-month driver
and occasional bodyguard. Conviction could carry life imprisonment.

Hamdan spoke nostalgically about the several weeks he spent in
Guantanamo's showcase Camp 4 — a bunkhouse camp for several dozen of
the most cooperative prisoners.

He said he was sent back to single-cell confinement after mouthing
off to a guard, and calling him "stupid." The prosecutor said he
stirred other detainees against the guard.

"You'd be able to share room with nine other people and live
almost a normal life," Hamdan said. "You speak together, you pray
together, you are exposed to the sun and the fresh air."

The military is holding the hearings in the same week that a
federal court will decide whether to freeze the driver's trial to let
his lawyers challenge the legality of the current commissions.